J. Paul Leonard Library

OneSearch Help

OneSearch jump-starts your research by giving you one place to start looking for articles, books, eBooks, theses and audio-visual materials. OneSearch allows you to search almost all of the content available in our 200+ databases as well as our Library Catalog. It was developed by the California State University Systemwide Digital Library Services group and is built on the Summon Discovery Service from SerialsSolutions.

Phrase Searching

OneSearch allows for phrase searching with the use of " ". The query "teacher education" will find results with that phrase.

Searching Specific Fields

The single search box will search across many fields automatically.

You can explicitly search the following fields by using the search fields dropdown box.

Title

Subject Terms

Author

Boolean Operators

OneSearch offers the following Boolean operations: OR, NOT and AND. The operators must be written in ALL CAPS.

By default, all terms in a search are combined with the AND operator. To expand the results set, use the OR operator "microcircuits OR nanocircuits" will return items that contain either term.

This can be combined with quoted terms such as "teacher education" OR "educator training".

To exclude items in OneSearch, use the NOT operator or "-" character before a term. When used in the following query "animal NOT dog" the results will not include the term "dog".

Wildcard Use

Searches within OneSearch can be performed using the wildcards "?" and "*".

The question mark (?) will match any one character and can be used to find "Olsen" or "Olson" by searching for "Ols?n".

The asterisk (*) will match zero or more characters within a word or at the end of a word. A search for "Ch*ter" would match "Charter", "Character", and "Chapter". When used at the end of a word, such as "Temp*", it will match all suffixes "Temptation", "Temple" and "Temporary".